After reading some of the comments I feel the need to add another: It is a matter of balance and this is really well covered in some of the chapters in the book by Gary L. Hardcastle and George A. Reisch, 2006, Bullshit and Philosophy – guaranteed to get perfect results every time, Open Court, Chicago.
While the entire book is worth reading, although some chapters are heavy slugging, the following chapters are highly recommended:
Chapter 6 by University of British Columbia Professor Alan Richardson – Performing Bullshit and the Post-Sincere Condition, shows that even universities are caught up in creating bullshit admin. jobs apparently forgetting about their real missions.
Chapter 14 by Heather Douglas – Bullshit at the Interface of Science and Policy: Global Warming, Toxic Substances, and Other Pesky Problems, page 215, is must reading for policy wonks, politicians, bureaucrats and obviously scientists.

Being the owner of Stanley Bing's (2006) book 100 Bullshit Jobs ....And How to Get Them, I was wondering how long it would take before this topic would be covered by the media. Since then an other book that is relevant to this discussion is: Joe Bennett (2012) Double Happiness: How Bullshit Works. If we stopped and asked every time a new project or task is undertaken: Is this task really necessary or is it pollution producing bullshit? there would be a significant reduction in carbon dioxide production.

Bertrand Russell also thought we could all work less in In Praise of Idleness he suggest the three day week.
I think the Government should take a lead by reducing all publc sector jobs to a 4 day/32 hour week and pay pro rata. An immediate saving of 14% of the pay bill and scope to create a few jobs for youngster, while avoiding the need for large scale redundancy and early retirement.

Still too many public sector hours, especially when the public sector -- not including a huge percentage of business that relies on government work of one kind or another -- account for around one-quarter of "bullshit" working folks.
Twenty-eight hours maximum is a good start and slashing government contractors by one-third to one-half means these firms must also cut "bullshit" working hours by a similar amount.

Still too many public sector hours, especially when the public sector -- not including a huge percentage of business that relies on government work of one kind or another -- account for around one-quarter of "bullshit" working folks.
Twenty-eight hours maximum is a good start and slashing government contractors by one-third to one-half means these firms must also cut "bullshit" working hours by a similar amount.

Still too many public sector hours, especially when the public sector -- not including a huge percentage of business that relies on government work of one kind or another -- account for around one-quarter of "bullshit" working folks.
Twenty-eight hours maximum is a good start and slashing government contractors by one-third to one-half means these firms must also cut "bullshit" working hours by a similar amount.

It seems to me that the answer to "how come, with all this technology, we're working harder than ever" comes down to market economics. The market wage for a job is based on supply and demand, plus or minus all the usual inefficiencies. Real wages aren't going to rise to the "work 15 hours" level unless there's a labor shortage. The profits of increased productivity go to those who are able to capture them -- largely owners of private businesses, the management of public companies, and financiers.

I don't think characterizing other people's jobs as worthless is very useful. It's more interesting to ask: with the actual operations of most of our companies outsourced, automated, or both, what is to keep the admin positions here?

I don't know if the author of this article reads the comments but just in case I would like to point out that David Graeber is a well respected and much published professor at the London School of Economics, one of the best universities in the world. So before waxing sarcastic and attempting to ridicule claims made in the article, not paper, by Prof. Graeber the author of this particular article might want to look at what they have written and see if they themselves have contributed anything of critical value in this hodgepodge of sarcasm and unfounded assumptions.

Wage slavery is as bad as slavery. There is no soft, friendly way to remove the problem. A global dismantling of governments (which will obviously turn the present commercial and financial system into the dense point at the centre of a black hole) is inevitable. Most of the wage slaves will be the ones to make it happen, so the governments' methods of smear-and-destroy (etc) used against intellectuals, activists, and anyone else visibly seen to pursue this change will have no impact on the outcome.

The essay seemed less directed at what automation has done and more at the oddly high-paying jobs in finance/law/government (lobbying)/marketing/accounting which seem extremely disconnected from tangible, useful value.

Each of these disciplines certainly has their reasons for existing in the first place. Without corporate law, it would be a lot tougher for companies to raise money without means of enforcing contracts. Without finance, there would be no moving funds from investors to borrowers who can make more than the investors can. And so on.

But all these areas do seem to have been caught in the same perverse cycle of regulatory capture. For lawyers or financiers, they were happy in the interim when they used government to shift more demand to their services. For example, patent lawyers were happy that their value went up a lot due to all the possible absurd patents out there.

However, once they get to the place where they can make more money, they realize the reason the government had to be used to increase their demand in the first place: they aren't really creating tangible value. A designer of the iPhone can see their work around everyone, making people's lives better. A lobbyist can't point to a self-serving clause in a tax bill and see how that makes people's lives better.

Indeed, this is why real production stagnated started in the 70's. Industries which make real things have seen much higher productivity, but productivity has stagnated overall because people aren't staying in these industries. Demand has shifted through government distortion to areas which do not improve our life and the result is generally stagnant productivity.

1) Graeber's "ruling class" is a mystical entity the illigitimate child of the Zeitgeist and the species being. But that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of bullshit jobs.

2) assembly line work is very boring. The wages were very high. It is natural to guess, as you do, that the high wages were a compensating differential. However, you don't have to guess. There is a huge literature which attempts to test your hypothesis. Your guess is incorrect -- it is massively rejected by the data. It is easy to see that high wages received by people without fancy degrees in manufacturing (especially heavy manufacturing)are definitely not just compensating differentials. Such jobs are eagerly sought. Quit rates are very low (note high wages because quit rates which are fine for other firms are too high for assembly line operations are *not* compensating differentials but rather efficiency wages). I think it is safe to say that almost everyone who has studied the issue dismisses your compensating differential argument. The Chicago view is that the differentials are unobserved human capital. The case against your hypotheis is so strong that the consensus that you are wrong is probably about as strong as the consensus that human activities contribute to global warming. In any case it is a super highly studied issue and some familiarity with the massive Econmic literature might add to the value of The Economist.

3) You mock the idea that managers ever do anything which doesn't maximize profits and shareholder value. This is a declaration of faith. No one who studies actual firms believes this. The profit maximizing firm is purely theoretical concept like an ideal gas of a frictionless system. Another possibility noted by Northcoat Parkinson is that administrations tend to expand to fill the allowed space. Again this is a testable hypothesis. If the managers are necessary, then firms making similar products will have similar numbers and there won't be a pattern of higher profitability of firms with a lower proportion of paper shuffles (really power point presenters) to production workers. That is you predict that GO and Toyota will be similar in number of layers of management and economic success. Or how about Ford ? When Iacocca left to save Chrystler a hated (and forgotten) Phillip Caldwell came and promtly laid of 30,000 headquarters staff. What valuable management services did Ford then lack ? Which US car company didn't go bankrupt.
According to you the whole movement towards downsizing and delayering in the 90s was silly. The layers and size are always presumably efficient. The productivity growth, increase in accoutning profits and increase in market value must be an illusion (or maybe it was the Zeigeist doing it ?).

4. The pro market view is schizophrenic. The presumptions is that people are the best judges of their own interest, that economic agents are rational (maybe not the full rational expectations), and that ordinary people are totally confused. The workers who say they really really want manufacturing jobs don't know what's good for them. The workers who say their job is a waste of the company's money don't either. The vast majority of the supposedly rational agents think you are full of it. You argue that they understand the economy (needed for Pareto efficiency) and that they don't understand it at all. Your argument is based simultaneously on self abasing esteem and utter contempt for the same set of people. It is both conventional among economists and inconsistent.

Tech companies often give away products for "free." Android is free, Facebook is free. And services that governments provide, such as roads, are "free," certainly to visitors. And free stores existed back in the counter culture of the 1960's. This is a new type of economy, where expectations of payback are almost metaphysical. It is metaphysical with an alternative healer in Oregon who gives away his services. Will this become widespread in employment? If so, there goes the "bullshit" jobs.

Well, the obvious solution, I would say, is to find the minimum requirement for workplaces to function at 100 percent capacity and dump the remaining unemployed workforce into those places, filling them to 110 percent capacity, 120 percent and so on, while reducing the actual cost of living, which would be housing costs. Housing has been said to be a barrier to innovation, (let's just say perhaps business formation), and is the real reason people work so long. If you look at the actual hours involved in building a house, it should rather take much less time to pay off, but the bankers are the queen of the hive and are our main problem, I would say, as a society. Perhaps socialism IS inevitable, when the main basics of life are satisfied. As to the idea that we simply want to consume more, I would say that's absolutely true, but in a practical sense, how much of our consumption is based on true needs and desires, or simply to fill a void that capitalism has thrust upon us?

Here is another explanation for the bloating payroll even in supposedly competitive private companies. They are the economic equivalent of the peacock's tail.
It is not enough to be profitable. To be respected, you have SHOW that you are doing things that others can't do. If, say, Facebook was keeping only 100 employees to run their website (which would probably be enough considering the basic service it provides), many would scream they are unprofessional amateurs, unworthy of our trust. But if they are 10,000, well, there must be something terribly complicated they are doing up there. No doubt someone will found some control task, marketing, pointless product differentiation or obscure project to hire them for. That works for any services, industry or administration, each all too happy to create complications to justify its importance and keep away newcomers.

What he characterizes by way of a ranching metaphor, I used to characterize as "make-work projects for overprivileged children." Seeing as the Economist is what we used to call a family newspaper, I will happily share this alternative description as equally valid but more suited to a wider audience.

Why did volume consumer electronics manufacturing get outsourced to mass cheap manual labor contractors in the Third World instead of being done for cheaper prices per unit with higher quality and better process control in the USA using automated manufacturing? Why are iPods still polished by hand as part of final manufacturing process? The technology to go 99% full-automated for electronics manufacturing existed in the late 80s.
Because excessive short-term profit emphasis led CEOs to conclusion that it would be better for their quarterly bonuses if they hired cheap Third World labor to get stuff built immediately instead of spending the money and time required to get jobs that should be done by machines to be done by machines. They knew that the benefit of lower manufacturing prices and lower warranty returns would be reaped by successor CEOs, not them.
Automating "bullshit jobs" outside manufacturing would be harder, more expensive, and in many cases, would take longer.
So it's not hard to see why the robots haven't come for all of those jobs yet, including that of the article's author, who based on his regurgitation of Conventional Wisdom instead of analysis based on reasoning, seems to me to be one of the prime targets for "automating bullshit jobs".
But general technological progress is making automating manufacturing and general business jobs easier and cheaper all the time. So the disappearance of most routine jobs, including those now defined as managerial / professional / technical is in a short enough timeframe that we collectively need to figure out what to do about it.
We're very close to the point where automating bullshit jobs in many cases can break even in a quarter or two and show increased ROI within the timeframes based on personal (as opposed to shareholder or stakeholder) modern CEOs actually work in.
As for the general issue of declining wages, the available evidence indicates that the elites have collectively decided go to an extractive model for dealing with the rest of society. Instead of paying out some of "their" money they have used the politicians and regulators they bought to help them extract, in order to support the infrastructures and social stability that their accumulation of wealth depends on via taxes and local employment at higher wages, they are cheaping out for short-term returns.
They depend on their purchase of the media in which political discussion takes place and increasingly overt repression to make sure that no alternative ideas that might make them have to spend money on the societies they are parasitic on can get traction.
This process is a 21st Century high-tech version of "decline and fall of empire".

My experience of this was even dumber: said CEOs were oursourcing *engineering design* jobs overseas... the tragedy being not only the jobs leaving home, but that it was an absolute debacle in terms of actually getting the job done.

"Bullshit jobs"... I have an anecdote relating this increasingly complex and oh-so-innovative modern economy.
Do you remember Meg Whitman ? Very serious candidate for governor of California. Business executive. Billionaire. As serious as it gets.
Before ebay she oversaw global management and marketing of Mr. Potato Head (TM) for Hasbro.

So I wonder what the duties of this very serious, driven graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School were...
- Listening to designers and inspecting Power Point presentations that suggested Mr. Potato Head (TM) should look fit and slimmer ?
- Cease-and-desist against any copyright infringing tomato-head and cucumber-head toys ?
- Specially dressed mrs Potato Head for muslim markets?
- million-dollar branding contract with Pixar's Toy Story ?

I'm somewhat of an artist, I'd love to make toys like mr potato head and sell them to kids. I can probably sell a few copy on Etsy (and, um, ebay), but would most likely starve doing that.

Because Hasbro has people like Meg, and branding, marketing, PR, corporate lawyers, sales and an army of underpaid Chinese manufacturers, ready to convince every kid and parent from Dubai to Alaska that they want this exact dull toy. I bet a big part of them feel their job is bullshit. It's only human.

Who wins? Nobody.
- My kid gets the same exact dull toy as everyone else
- I can't make a living as an artist (and attempt bold, witty and personal innovations to the said toy)
- people like Meg work long hours pouring over executive decisions. Their ambition (somewhat pathological - I'd say) is rewarded with top pay.
- the others suffer from the pointlessness of their tasks

You're right Daniel. Most jobs are aimed at consumerism.
By bullshit jobs, the author implies jobs that don't add to science,technology, arts etc. or advance any field.
Hence most jobs even accounting, law etc. are bullshit.

It's hard do admit this, but i do work in one exactly job described above, a total "bullshit job", that i totally hate.
And as an worker graduated with academic level, i must realize the bad shape our society found itself in modern days.
The cause we can not work less, and in less hateful jobs, may be seeked in the egoistic nature of the human animal, but it is just my vain supposition.

I think the use of the term "bullshit job" is more appropriately applied to the kind of writing in this article. If this article hadn't been written, the world would be no better or no worse. And it would be no less poorly informed. The earth would revolve every 24 hours on its axis...and the noble writer of this piece could go out and get a job driving a cab.

As old John Maynard used to say (paraphrased): If you hire someone to drive a person from point A to point B; and then to drive that person from point B back to point A, you have created a bullshit job. And, buddy, that's no bullshit.

" If you hire someone to drive a person from point A to point B; and then to drive that person from point B back to point A, you have created a bullshit job."
So, you have just defined commuting as a bullshit job.
Maybe so in a few more decades...

I know it's just anecdote, but I find Graeber's contention about the multitude who manage to "look busy" 50-60 hours each week in the office but, in reality, spend little of that time doing productive work, entirely plausible based on my personal corporate travails.

A world in which a company elects to pay people who actually work 15 hours a wage ostensibly suited for 40 hours of work raises interesting economic questions. And a world in which people will sit at their desks browsing the internet or mill around the coffee machine for 50 hours simply to keep up appearances raises a number of interesting social questions. Graeber may not be the ideal candidate for the former set of questions, but he's got to be good for the latter, right?

I think it's exactly the lack of correction that demands that people work 25 more hours than their optimal productive selves. GM has always, and continues to be, a behemoth, and the "self-correcting" might have come in the 60s of the last century. We are all complicit in believing that administrative tasks and 60-hour weeks are productive. We could employ everyone and still be the global leader in all capital enterprise. A higher wage, a shorter week, happier employees, and everyone employed.

It strikes me as a sort of white-collar Fordism. If people like you describe were subject to economy-wide layoffs, and firms hired only so many people as were absolutely necessary to produce whatever they produce at their current rate of production, then unemployment would skyrocket and demand would nosedive. I'd wager that this is the market adjusting to the puzzle of disemployment wrought by increased labor automation. Perversely, white-Collar water-treaders (themselves, largely blameless) became an important pillar of the western consumer economies.